The Official Site of the Missouri Interscholastic Journalism Association

MIJA
The Official Site of the Missouri Interscholastic Journalism Association

MIJA
The Official Site of the Missouri Interscholastic Journalism Association

MIJA

Individual Contests

THIS INFORMATION WILL BE UPDATED IN JANUARY OF THE CURRENT SCHOOL YEAR FOR THAT YEAR’S CONTEST.

 

BetterBNC will be open Jan. 9 for 2026 contest submissions! Please refer to the 2026 Contest Instructions to organize your submissions. As a reminder, membership renewals must be submitted by Jan. 30 of each school year if your school wishes to participate in contests or JDay for free. 

As you prepare your submissions, please remember

  • the submission deadline is Friday, Jan. 30, 2026.
  • any PDF that should be evaluated as a spread must be submitted as such. For directions on how to combine single page PDFs into a spread using InDesign, see here; otherwise, speak with your yearbook or printing rep for assistance.
  • to sign into BetterBNC early to make sure you will not have issues logging into the system as the deadline approaches. If you do encounter issues, please contact Jamie Munoz.

Contact the MIJA office at [email protected] or Christina Manolis if you have any questions. Thank you for your patience! MIJA board members are made up of volunteers who are advisers and educators just like you. Please contact us with any concerns or suggestions on how we can improve the contest process, or if you would be willing to assist with MIJA in the future.

Thank you, and good luck! 

Jamie Muñoz and Sarah Kirksey, JDay Contest Coordinators

 

HOW TO ENTER: Use these 2026 Instructions to MIJA Schools/Teachers/Students document to enter the 2025 contest! 

INDIVIDUAL STUDENT, ADULT AND BUSINESS RECOGNITIONS

(Must be received by midnight of the listed due date.)

OVERALL & INDIVIDUAL CONTESTS

All overall contest categories are divided by four school enrollment sizes, so all publications compete with schools of similar size. Enrollment size classifications are included on instructions for the contest. All contests submissions are due Friday, Jan. 30. See the instruction sheet for specifics. 

MIJA’s AI Policy

Any contest submission found to have used AI for content creation besides for methods MIJA approves of will be disqualified. 

Such approved methods can be, but are not limited to, using AI to 

  • generate story or visual design ideas, 
  • develop interview questions, 
  • remove a background of photographs/images, 
  • transcribe interviews with supervision from the writer, 
  • spell/grammar check written content without altering the writer’s phrasing,

Use of AI that is NEVER approved of is having it, rather than the scholastic journalism student, create written, visual or auditory content; all written, visual and auditory content must be the original work of scholastic journalism students or copyrighted materials that the program has documented approval to publish.

JDAY ON-SITE CONTESTS

Each adviser may also sign up individual student(s) or team(s) (depending on the contest) for one of the on-site contests. The categories are below:

CONTEST JUDGING RURBICS

  • Individual contest judging rubrics for broadcast, newspaper/newsmagazine, photography, radio/podcast and yearbook can be found here.
  • Overall contest judging rubrics for broadcast, newspaper/newsmagazine and online can be found here and Overall Yearbook can be found here.

QUESTIONS:

Please contact the MIJA office at [email protected] with any questions.